How To Spot Real Experts In The Online Marketing Industry

In an industry where many people claim to be a guru, influencer, or thought leader, how does a business owner figure out who the real experts are? It’s extremely hard to tell. Business owners may be led to believe they are working with experts when in reality the person is merely winging it by imitating the market trends they read on blogs and social media posts.

I’ve come across alleged experts who ended up unable to execute the tasks at which they claimed to be the expert. Recently, we decided to expand one of the closets in our home, so I asked around for some recommendations and hired a few contractors. I felt confident the project was in the hands of experts. They worked on the construction of the closet, did a seemingly fine job, and were paid well for their services. All their work seemed legitimate at the time and quite similar to that of any other master craftsmen.

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Not more than two days later, the entire closet came crashing down. It turns out they had neglected to install the primary support beam, a critical component that would have held the entire structure together. I put my faith in the hands of these so-called experts, but I ended up not only having to pay for their mistakes, but also paying for the job to be done a second time.

The point is that these experts were not experts at all. They presented themselves as seasoned professionals, but they were amateurs who lacked the experience and acumen to install the closet’s most fundamental component. No authentic expert would ever make such an omission.

However, this isn’t just a problem within the construction industry. Poser experts plague online marketing also.

Recently I attended a large digital marketing conference on the West Coast. While there was no shortage of sharp and informed speakers, there were also a lot of one-hit wonders and those piggybacking off the ideas of others.

I did a little digging into the backgrounds of some of the speakers after the conference, and what I found was telling. I checked on LinkedIn and elsewhere to research the conference speakers and their experience with internet marketing. It turns out many of the speakers that year were the same ones who were in the audience the year before. The only difference was that they had experienced success with one client and were now using that as the gold standard.

But one successful online marketing campaign does not an expert make.

A genuine online marketing expert will have many achievements in a variety of areas. They will have a diverse portfolio of successes with a multitude of businesses and industries. That is why business owners need to thoroughly vet prospective online marketing partners to ensure they end up with a professional instead of a poser. I have to remind myself to be unafraid of asking the tough questions and making the folks I hire prove themselves to me.

In my twenty-plus years in business, I’ve had failures and successes. During that time, I learned a few lessons the hard way by trusting people who were amateurs posing as experts. To get the most out of your online marketing spend, I recommend taking the time to find the people who have experienced repeated success in different contexts.

They will know when that critical support beam is needed because their past experience has shown them what happens when it’s left out. Making an investment now in working with genuine experts will not only save you time, money, and headaches down the road, but will also ensure that your business’s online reputation is a strong and credible one.

This blog features contributors who don’t write regularly for Forbes but who have timely insight on starting, running and building businesses.